Some projects are commercial. Some projects are commissions. And some projects you build because the thing should exist, and you happen to be able to build it.
The Hindu Prayers App was the third kind.
It started when my mother, visiting us in London, asked if I could find her a prayer in Marathi on the internet. I could. It was on a site that crashed her phone's browser and was surrounded by slot-machine ads. She laughed politely and put the phone down. I felt awful.
A few weeks later, I started building a small app. Just for her, at first. It grew from there.
What it does
- Over 200 prayers, covering 35 deities.
- Available in English, Hindi, and Marathi — read, listen, or both.
- Works entirely offline, so it's kind to your data plan.
- Daily alarms, so you can be gently reminded of your practice.
- Search, so you can find the thing you're looking for without scrolling for five minutes.
What we cared about, while building it
No ads, ever. A prayer app with ads in it felt fundamentally wrong. The app is free. It always will be.
Beautiful typography. Devanagari script in particular deserves care. We spent weeks on font licences, baseline alignment, and getting the line-height right. Small things. They matter.
Respectful of the source. Every prayer was checked against traditional sources. Where there were regional variations, we noted them. Where we weren't sure, we asked elders.
Kind to older phones. The app needed to work on a six-year-old budget Android phone, because many of our users are in rural India where that's the phone they have. Every megabyte mattered. Every second of startup time mattered.
What we learned from the users
The app now has hundreds of thousands of downloads, and a 4.7-star rating on the Play Store. We read every review. A few themes show up again and again:
The elderly use it daily. Grandmothers who couldn't read the small print of old prayer books are suddenly able to continue practices they'd quietly given up on. We've had emails from families saying their mother now leads the daily prayer at dinner, because she can read the larger text on the tablet.
The diaspora uses it for continuity. Second- and third-generation Indians abroad use it to keep practices alive that might otherwise fade. "I learned my grandmother's favourite prayer from your app," read one message. That one sat with us for a while.
People use it in hospitals, at funerals, at weddings. Moments when the printed book is awkward and the phone is already in your hand. This wasn't a use case we'd designed for, but we're grateful for it.
Why I'm sharing this now
I'm writing this now because the app is coming up on its tenth birthday, and we still maintain it. Not much — small updates, compatibility fixes, the occasional corrections to translations that a user has kindly flagged. It'll keep going.
It's one of the most unambiguously good things our small team has built. It doesn't make money. It won't scale to be a business. It's just a quiet, respectful little app that a lot of people use a little bit every day.
That's enough. Sometimes that's everything.
